Matchstick Girl
by Black Sunrise
Summary: It started with "What I wish would happen to Faye after ep.26", but now I've decided to expand it into a storyline that'll involve conspiracies, angsty identity crises, and if you're lucky: a happy ending.
1. Default Chapter

DISCLAIMER ALERT: COWBOY BEBOP NOT MINE AT ALL!

Jet fidgeted with the intercom, waiting for that urgent signal. It was hard to sneak past Faye since she turned protective, possessive and insomniac all at once. His hands had been shaking as he slipped a sedative into her fried eggs, had watched her spoon and chew every mouthful of it into her mouth like some bad mystery theatre criminal. That woman had the metabolism the speed of a bullet train, and he did not want to have her trailing along behind him on this rendezvous.

Judging by the flickering of her eyelids – she'd passed out.

Wouldn't take very much to put her to sleep, he thought, her body was aching for it already. So now it was time to get on the Hammerhead and head out.

He slipped into the interior. With a sigh he slipped onto the seats, taking comfort in the mould of his body imprinted into the seats from so many long years of usage. His appraisal of the interior was delaying him from thinking about Spike.

Ed's face flashing open on the intercom screen meant that he couldn't put it off any longer. It was time.

He rubbed the furrow in his brow with a tired hand, groaning into his palm. _Enough procrastinating. Get going. _When Ed first told him of her findings on Spike, he was in the midst of debating what kind of funeral to hold for him. A funeral seemed so… regimented, suffocating, something that Spike wasn't.

It seemed more appropriate to toast the guy with some moonshine and crack a joke before spreading his ashes into the wind. _That's how Spike would have wanted it. Flying off into the wind, leaving nothing substantial of himself behind. _Jet thought it would have made a poetic eulogy if it wasn't laced in resentment.

He hated himself for it.

There were so many comrades that he'd outlived, and none of them so valued to him as Spike. And yet he was the only one that he'd ever spoken ill of after his death. He was going to find Spike and pay his last respects to the vagrant bounty hunter, best friend and closest thing to a son he ever had. _Little brother._ Jet amended with a grunt. He was balding, but he was _not _old.

"You're going to wreck the engine leaving it on idle."

"FAYE?" Jet nearly screeched in surprise, finally noticing Faye seated in the Red-tail opposite.

"Hi!" she waved with a lazy flick of her wrist, her smile a pantomime of his guilty one. Tipping her head forward, she lit the cigar protruding between her lips. _Another annoying habit. _Jet thought with a grimace, knowing she was studying him under her hooded gaze. "Where you off to?" she asked then, her tone suddenly somber and suspicious.

"Hmph… While you're out of commission for the next month catching up on some sleep, somebody has to keep food on the table." Jet growled at her menacingly, hoping she wasn't going to follow him.

"Really?" Faye laughed in a low womanly chuckle. "I thought you'd finally found a rich widow to seduce." She was referring to the white suit he was wearing, coupled with the fedora hat – articles of his ISSP days.

He regarded her knowing green eyes, expectantly waiting for his answer to confirm her suspicions. She never paid this much attention to him unless it was something of personal interest. _Maybe I DO look too suspicious in a suit and a hat._ He considered reluctantly.

"A man's affair has nothing to do with a meddlesome, provoking woman." Jet admonished, with the patience of a father at his last straw. His tone was unequivocal, his tense 'before the storm breaks' facial expression ominous enough to send ISSP rookies running home to change their shorts.

The meddlesome, provoking woman, however, was slipping on her gloves as if he had said nothing at all. "A man's affair? A man only starts being huffy and officious when he's got something to hide." At this, she gripped the handles with a resolute glint in her eye. "I'm going with you."

They glared at each other through the heated silence. The hair on Jet's beard was bristling as he sat back in his chair, regarding his willful adversary. And then he noticed that Faye's eyes were fighting to close. Her grimace wasn't a frown directed at him, she was fighting herself to stay awake! That stubborn, headstrong girl!

He let out a low, amazed chuckle and began counting. _3…2…1…_

_BANG._

Faye hit the dashboard snoring.

888

"Don't!" Came Jet's strangled yell as he watched the orange-haired girl bend to the ground and sniff at the blood-crusted ground. Like a hyperactively protective mother, he fished a handkerchief from his front pocket, held the back of her head in one hand and wiped vigorously at her nose with the other. "Didn't anybody tell you not to put your nose where it doesn't belong?"

She eyed him with that unsettlingly innocent gaze of hers, as if turning his phrase over in her mind to check its merits. And then she began to laugh. "Hee hee… that's what Jet-person said to Faye-Faye when she was asking about Jet-person's girlfriend."

After the last year of living in denial, Jet felt relieved to hear Ed's innocent and girlish laugh again. He gave her a warm smile and a ruffle on the head. It would have been an endearing moment, if they weren't standing over Spike's final conflict with Vicious.

"Doesn't this scene bother you at all?" Jet asked, feeling guilty for exposing her to the scene. In all their months living together, he'd taken care NEVER to expose her to the seedier sides of their job. It was like taking a baby to a strip-joint.

"I don't know." She replied truthfully, her pink dress fluttering in the wind. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she looked off into the distance over the grey city of Tharsis. It was a beautiful sunny day. "You said Spike-person had to take care of old business, and that he died?" The last word came out so plainly, no hush or catch in her voice. _As if it was an everyday occurrence. _Jet thought, his own eyes starting to itch and water. _Damn wind._

"I thought Spike had taken all his unfinished business to the grave." Jet managed to say between puffs of smoke. "I heard some news that Vicious was still alive. I want to see him for myself."

"You're going to kill him?" Ed's voice was uncharacteristically hushed as she pinpointed his true intent. Unlike the shrewd glint Faye had in her eye when he lied, hers were all-knowing and he felt all his dirty secrets were open to her.

Before he could answer, however, she'd gone whooshing off, clambering over the rubble like a monkey with Ein close on her heels. She'd reached the top and yelled something about circles and tangerines before using it as a platform to dive off into Jet's anxiously beckoning arms.

The look of complete girlish pleasure in his arms made him start laughing out loud for the first time in ages. Well, he decided generously, since he'd already asked for his favour it wouldn't do them any harm to enjoy rest of the day as a surrogate father and his offbeat daughter.


	2. Too little, Too late

Disclaimer: Do not own Cowboy Bebop

She had lost her quarry. Yet Again. There was nothing much for it but to go home, she supposed, shooting off her gun into the air in frustration. As if in response, the sky began to break into a drowning rainshower. She kept her eyes squelched against the dampening cold as she made her way out of the alleyway.

She found herself on a main street. Pulling her red sweater over her shoulders, she kept trudging through the rain where others ran under cover or bought newspapers to shield their heads.

While she didn't like self-pity in others, she sure as hell WANTED to crack a big, childish tantrum in the middle of this glistening Alva city.

And as if the bustling city didn't only serve to remind her of her own poverty, the sight of red roses being sold at every street corner reminded her of something else.

"Happy Valentine's Day darling!" a tall luscious blonde gasped as she stepped underneath her boyfriend's umbrella.

"What a day!" he yelled into the rain, smiling down at her lovingly as he wrapped his free arm around her. Tucking half her body under his grey trench-coat, they melted into each other before they ducked into a high-class restaurant. _Black Jack's _glowed in golden light against the black backdrop.

Faye watched with barely concealed malice, feeling the sharp edge of loneliness pierce her fresh wound. A dozen epithets filled her mind instead of a dozen roses.

"I'm afraid you must be lost, miss." The manager of _Black Jack's _had come out into the rain. Eyeing her clothes and her blank look, he continued, "The red-light district is on the other side of town."

Concern for the image of his restaurant than any real concern for her welfare prodded him to cover her with a suit-jacket. "Don't worry about returning it. Just go away." He added with a shudder before he returned inside where he continued to glare at her indignantly.

Annoyed, Faye was about to light a cigarette and lean her butt-cheeks on the glass when her eyes caught the wide-eyed gaze of a little girl in the window. She was in the middle of a Valentine's dinner with her parents when she caught sight of Faye in her skimpy outfit.

The bold-as-brass, self-modeled Faye Valentine had suddenly receded under the girl's inquisitive gaze, and she was left asking herself: _What must she be thinking?_

She saw herself as the little girl sharing the same sort of meal with her parents in Singapore, a city much like this one. In the glass reflection, she saw the bedraggled, shrewish whore everybody else took her for.

In dread, she noticed her mother turn to see Faye and come to the same conclusion as the manager. She watched the apprehension turn to shock as she placed a hand on the girl's face to shield her eyes while her father stared at Faye derisively.

_I used to be like her. _

And then she observed that everybody else had turned to look at her, some were tittering behind their hands, others sneering and derisive.

_I used to be her. _

But she could never find the little girl in her again. No matter how many memories she had of her childhood, she was never going to be anybody but Faye Valentine. She was always going to live in deficit. Regret and loss.

_Spike was wrong. _She thought, staring at her innocent counterpart. _I have no future. _Feeling a sob rise in her throat, Faye set off running.

She ran on and on, not caring who she bumped into. By the time she realized, she had lost her way into the heart of Alva City, surrounded by nightmarish heart-shaped balloons, fluffy white teddy bears, couples. People who belonged.

Her mask was falling, and she just couldn't care anymore as she stood in the middle of Capital Square and let the tears fall. Not the first time she'd admitted how lonely she was, but the very first time she'd finally said: "Enough."

She winced as she remembered pleading with Spike to stay with them. Such childish dreams she thought as her words all came down to one thing: We can live happily ever after. Don't go.

The end of a fantasy roller-coaster ride pretending nobody could hurt her if she was tough and hard-as-nails had come. She couldn't live in suspended animation anymore, pretending that nothing in real-life mattered if you never paid it any respect or attention.

Feeling her sobs ebb away, she decided to find her way home.

"What the hell?" Jet screamed as he followed a puddle of tracks from the hangar to Faye's room. "HEY!" he banged on her door. "I just cleaned the floor yesterday!"

No answer. _Typical_, Jet thought. "Does this mean you lost a bounty, AGAIN?"

Silence. _Damn woman's probably asleep._ He concluded, spotting a wet suit-jacket draped over the back of the yellow couch. _Why couldn't she learn to put things in the laundry? _"I'm not your fucking maid, you know!" he yelled into the silence, trudging off to the laundry where he continued to vent his frustrations by wringing the jacket.

_Probably dry-cleaning only too._ He growled low, stuffing the jacket into the drier regardless. "I should really just go back to living in Ganymede, it's less work scrubbing barnacles off the side of a ship than taking care of a self-centred shrew!" he yelled again.

_Oh shit, did I check the pockets?_ He asked himself in dismay, opening the catch and checking. He really hated it when forgotten Kleenex covered his newly washed clothes in a coat of teeny-tiny staticky balls.

He found a lottery ticket, just damp around the edges. Placing it in his back pocket for safe-keeping, he stuffed the jacket back in.

Feeling for a cup of hot tea after a rain-soaked day, he turned the corner to find himself face to face with Faye.

"Jesus!" he swore, patting his chest. It wasn't so much the fact that she had just appeared out of nowhere that frightened him as much as he had mistaken the lackluster woman for someone else.

"Tea?" she asked him, her voice tired. _As if she'd just finished crying. _Jet observed. She had evidently taken her makeup off, but that hadn't explained her pallor, or her listlessness as she moved about the kitchenette.

"The last bounty will give us another couple of days, Faye." Jet murmured consolingly, sighing into his hand.

"It's not that." She whispered, methodically placing teacups onto a tray instead of a couple of mugs like she was more apt to doing. _Must be something she used to do when she was younger._ Jet surmised as he watched her prepare the tea tray as if she'd done it a thousand times. She didn't seem to notice the difference.

Suddenly she sighed, wiping a tired hand across her forehead. Plunking both her hands along the side of the kettle in apparent defeat, she told him to watch the kettle.

Pushing past him, he heard the bathroom door slam shut.

_Interesting._ Jet thought, taking her cue by the kettle. After it was done, he settled himself by the computer, prepared to look up some more bounties when he remembered the lottery ticket in his back pocket.

Faye didn't come out until he had drunk the whole teapot. He left her to sit numbly on the yellow coach as he boiled another pot of tea.

"Is this about…_him_?" He called from the kitchen, leaning against the doorway so he could see her.

At the slight mention of Spike, she tossed her head to the side.

"Not everything is about that stupid…fucking…." She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence, jerking her oversized shirt over her knees in anger instead.

Jet had realized long ago that Faye had lost her fiery spark ever since Spike left. Her successful bounties were few and far in between, her aim was shoddy, she was walking without knowing where she was going… It wasn't just a matter of grief, she just wasn't cut out for bounty-hunting anymore and everything about her but her mind knew it.

"He went back to confront his real-life, Faye." Jet said later as he poured her another cup of tea. "Maybe we should take a page from his book and go back to ours."

"Oh? And who do you think will take a woman with no education? How many hours will I have to wait tables before I can get rid of the massive debt on my head? How do you think I'll enjoy sitting around the old-folks home with my buddies from high-school?" she said bitterly. "I have no future, Jet."

"You're just being stubborn."

"I _have_ no future!" she yelled at him, slamming the cup of tea on the table. "What DON'T you get? I've already thought about how I could… start a normal life… but I can't with this massive debt over my head… no education… no real work experience…" _I'd have to start all over again, alone… Alien…_ And then she started sobbing. "And if that piece of shit went back to his so-called real-life, then what the fuck were we to him, huh? Just some nightmare? Something, some people to pass away the time in purgatory with?"

Jet continued to sip his tea as if she hadn't said anything. Faye sneered, "Typical middle-aged passive-aggressive…"

Except for jerking his head up and leveling his gaze with hers, he betrayed no sign of ire. "If he stayed with us, what the hell do you think the syndicate would do? Let him go on his merry way? If they didn't stop at killing Julia, they would have certainly come after US as a way to get to Spike!"

THERE he said it! He said his name in front of her.

She responded like she'd been slapped.

"We meant _nothing_ to him!" She yelled at him, goading him into yelling back at her. Anything to break this immense grief in her chest. Believing that the sore loser didn't give one iota of compassion or respect for her or either of them meant she could forget him. Put him in the OUT slot, flush him down the toilet, stuff him in the blender… She _wanted _to hear Jet say Spike was worthless so she could believe it too and fucking move on!

Reading the myriad of emotions flitting across her eyes, Jet chuckled despite the heavy atmosphere. For all the callous, selfish and unfeeling things she did, he knew her just as well as he knew Spike: That in matters of emotion they were both just hot air. This time, though, he decided to call her on it: "Now you're just being childish."

His easy paternal smile and the twinkle in his eye almost coaxed a smile from Faye. She forgot how easily the old man could see through her these days.

Leaning back, she sighed, rubbing at the corner of her eye. After a vast silence, she threw her pride away and asked innocently, "We meant something to him, then?"

Jet was immediately struck by the need in her voice, the little girl she used to be that he could only nod. His eyes affirming the one thing she had wanted to hear from Spike the most. He didn't care to voice the fact that she had still missed one important thing: Spike had died to protect them from Vicious as much as he needed to confront his past.

Thankfully, she only continued drawing invisible circles along her leg as she hiccupped.

"Here's something that'll cheer you up." Jet remembered suddenly, tossing the lottery ticket he'd found earlier in the suit pocket.

"Is this mine?" Faye asked, looking confused.

"You brought the suit jacket home, right?"

"Hmph. Something like that." She sneered derisively, preparing to rip the ticket into shreds. With her luck, it was probably worth nothing.

"Don't want to rip up a ticket that's worth 300 billion woolongs, do you?"

"This is not the time to be jerking my leg, old man." She warned, quelling the excitement rising in her chest.

"I'm not." He replied, flipping the computer screen to the day's winning numbers.

She had to check the details 10 times before she'd let herself believe her luck.

LUCK. She sat there transfixed by the word that had eluded her so many times.

Waiting for her to break out into raucous joy, Jet's anticipation wilted as he realized that she was most likely in state of shock. Shrugging to himself, he continued to the kitchen to prepare their meal.

"Decided what you're going to do with your winnings?" he asked later when he returned with their meal. The overcooked red pepper seemed ridiculously unhealthy now when she held 10 lifetimes of fortune in her slim hand. And she began to smile.

A wicked little smile, coupled with a vengeful lift in her delicate eyebrow.

"We're going out to eat." She replied, picking up the suit jacket and draping it over her shoulder. "And I know the exact place."

Leaving Jet in the living room, she suddenly realized that he could have easily swindled her out of the winning ticket. Even after telling her about it, he didn't bother asking for a share, or even a repayment of debts. He just sat there, smiling indulgently at her good (if not accidental) fortune.

She knew he was a huge sap, but she didn't realize just how much until now.

And so she did something she had never done before: "Thank you."

To Jet, the sound of two simple words never felt more absolving since he'd taken on the rest of his motley crew. Sensing himself on the verge of ridiculous joy, he scrubbed hard at his balding head and mumbled: "Happy Valentine's Day."

Author's note: I know it's terribly sloppy NOT to understand the basic currency system of Cowboy Bebop, but just assume the number is First Prize of any big lottery win.


	3. Hope, Grace & Mercy

MARTIAN GOV'T DECLARES WAR ON CRIME SYNDICATES

ALVA CITY, Mars: Alva City's Mayor, Klein Weatherall has extended a helping hand to Tharsis towards reshaping its legal and justice system after crushing the insurgence of crime syndicates on Mars.

Currently campaigning for the Martian Presidential elections, Weatherall's declaration comes in response to the sudden decimation of a dominating criminal syndicate in Tharsis, the Red Dragons.

"Crime syndicates flourish because the justice and legal system is corrupt. To ensure the safety of the ordinary Martian citizen, true justice must prevail and crime must be extinguished in all levels of society." Weatherall stated after meeting with current Martian President, David Armstrong.

Since the decimation of Red Dragons' headquarters, previously registered as a legitimate business, the government has taken decisive measures in flushing out Tharsis City's criminal underground.

"Our efforts in flushing out the criminal underground thus far has proven successful. Now it's time for our legal and justice system to be perfected so that a tumor like the Red Dragons never happens again."

It is believed that Thursday's air-strike between the planets Mars and Earth has brought down the last remaining members of the Red Dragon syndicate including its avian command center. - MAP

888

"Happy Valentine's day."

Grace placed a dozen red roses by the patient's bed, not realizing that the clinic's resident striped cat had followed her into his room. Shooing the cat out of patient's rooms was a daily occurrence at the St.Alban's Clinic, but Grace was as absent-minded as she was infinitely compassionate.

And so the cat sat atop the side table unobserved, tail swishing impatiently to and fro as it watched the chubby blonde nurse bob out of the room.

When she came back later to change the invalid's i.v. drip, she exclaimed in surprise when she found the toppled vase and the spilled water. A single rose lay in a puddle on the floor.

Scolding herself for missing the cat, she bent to pick the rose up and suddenly stopped. Everything but the slow drip of water from the tabletop to the ground had stopped moving.

It was raining that day. The rose fell from the dozen clutched in his hand and lay in the puddle forgotten.

He hoped she would be there.

The cat's cold nose against her outstretched hand startled her from the vision. "SILLY CAT!" she exclaimed softly, stroking his long whiskers.

She stood up to replace the i.v. bag, gazing lingeringly on the patient's face. How could such a tender vision come from a cold-hearted killer?

888


	4. Square pegs

DISCLAIMER ALERT: Do not own Cowboy Bebop whatsoever…

BTW. Yeah, I'm pulling out chapters and pasting in new ones in its place… This unfinished story has been on my computer for WAY too long and I am determined to finish it.. GOOD LUCK TO ME. Hope you all like it. If not, then I sincerely apologize  Take care.

When she had won the lottery, Jet was afraid she would blow it all at the Casino. She surprised him by taking him to a ritzy restaurant called "Black Jack" instead. He felt rather sheepish in his typical white suit since it felt tight in the wrong places. It felt conspicuously tighter when she stepped out into the sitting room in a gorgeous sparking gown and killer stiletto heels.

"What's up with you?" she asked him quizzically, watching him stretch his collar for the thousandth time that evening.

"Uh…" he looked up from his T-bone steak. "It's…" He hadn't realized how gorgeous she could look. Her hair was slicked up into a bun, her porcelain skin shone bright in the subdued lighting – and for once she didn't have the haunted/hunted look. She looked content as she intently studied her surroundings.

And why was she giving the manager such a hard time?

"You look beautiful." He said instead, a compliment she received with mixed feelings. There was only ONE man who called her that, and he had probably finished serving his time as a small fry in jail.

But then again, when had any of the men on the Bebop appreciated her? TRULY appreciated her after all the impromptu rescues, the touch of common sense and savvy she contributed to the crew… _Ahhh, who am I kidding anyway?_

"Thank you." She said instead, her eyes glowing softly. "You would look passably handsome too if you stopped fiddling with your tie." She added, reaching over to adjust it.

His breath caught in his throat when he realized how soft the skin on her inner arms looked, and liked how her eyes had gentled when she said 'Thank you.' He started wondering if he could see more of that Faye if…

"There." She said, patting his tie down. Was he imagining it, or was she letting her hand linger on his chest for a second?

When he looked up, her eyes shone up at him mischievously, implying YES.

Jet's mouth had gone dry. "Ahhh… What are you going to do with your money?"

"Hmm…" Withdrawing her hands, she continued to study the restaurant with a future proprietor's calculating gaze. "After I pay off my debts, I think I'll have enough cash to buy this place."

"If you want to become a restaurant owner, you'll have to be here for most of the time." Jet replied, dreading what that implied for the first time.

She nodded, agreeing. And then leaned forward and crossed her hands on the table in front of her oblivious to the fact that her breasts became more pronounced in her low-cut dress. "I think Alva City is where I'd like to make a new start. Buy an apartment, or a house…"

"Looking at a top-class place like this, I don't think the proprietor will give it away so easily."

"Then I'll make another place like this." She replied nonchalantly. "It doesn't matter, Jet. I've made the manager grovel so now I can move on."

"You seem very serious." He said, uneasy with the new Faye that emerged. Usually she was as transparent as day, but right now her thoughts were hidden in her narrowed eyes. An impulsive Faye with money (A LOT OF IT) was a scary concept.

"You don't believe I can do it." She commented, studying him from the corner of her eye.

"This is Alva City, Faye. It's not Ganymede or Earth where just having money can get you anywhere. It's being rich and having connections to the right people. Something you don't have."

She said nothing, but a beautiful smile wreathed her lips. It seemed to say We'll see about that.

"Besides that… the image of you as a hard-as-nails business woman…" he shook his head as the right words eluded him. "Keeping a business is a gamble, but it's not like the Bebop… You can't just leave whenever you feel like it, Faye."

"I don't want to die being nobody." She stated slowly. There was a tiny word in that sentence that held such a monstrous note of finality for her. The undisclosed part of her psyche missed the damned lunkhead, but no amount of misery and mourning could wipe out that self-absorbed voice in her head that screamed when she thought of it.

Animals did it, Humans did it. Fucking vegetables did it. Why couldn't _she _accept it?

D-I-E. It was a miniscule word. It could just mean one of a pair of dice, which just meant that it was a gambling implement. That stellar piece of logic she put together one very late insomniac night pacified her for half a day until her overworked imagination asked her – _If DEATH is just a die, then what would you be betting with?_

"Hell, we're all brought into this world screaming…" Jet replied after a significant pause, stirring the olive around his martini glass without really seeing it. "It's only human to go out screaming too. Life just seems like some horrible surprise party."

He chuckled at his astute observation of life, oblivious to Faye rolling her eyes.

"Je-sus…" she murmured, flipping her hair agitatedly to the side. "I wish you'd just learn a language instead of trimming those bonsais… It gives you too much time to think up horrible fortune cookie sayings…"

Their somewhat peaceful evening went downhill after that.

888

Much to Jet's surprise, the thought of opening a restaurant had stuck with Faye just as tenaciously as her immense debt had. After a mere week of doing basic research aboard the Bebop, she set out to look for an apartment. Faye being Faye, she couldn't just leave the Bebop without complaining about how the dismal poverty-stricken surroundings stifled her creative juices.

Jet knowing Faye, she would have died if she had to stare at the Spike-shaped indentation on the yellow couch any longer. Either that or her feverish theatrical attempts at cleaning the Bebop was a subtle hint that she wanted him to move down to Alva City too.

She was such a kid sometimes.

She directed the construction of her restaurant with an iron fist. Everything had to be JUST SO. Thankfully the restaurant designer she'd hired, Marjorie, had been dying for a challenge. _They're made for each other._ Jet thought as he watched them flit from soulmates one moment to mortal enemies the next.

Faye rented an apartment, and Jet found himself hanging around Alva City more than he liked. He thought he'd be relieved to find himself alone again, but he found himself gravitating towards this competent woman. Even though she always bailed on him in the past, she did so with the clear desire that SOMEBODY should come and bail HER out. It was a selfish one-way street, but something that he'd become accustomed to. As he watched her pore over designs, chefs, uniforms… food… her independence became more and more pronounced and he felt more and more isolated.

It also didn't help when the bars and restaurants he had to accompany Marjorie and Faye to in the hayday of their 'brain-storming' period were all frequented by the Alva City populace that never ate or saw the light of day. Despite their brittle physique, the haughty demeanor of the spoilt upper class more than compensated for lack of food and water, and he fit in with them like a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.

_At least SHE looks happy. _Jet thought as he hulked by the bar and gulped down his whiskey. He noticed with a grimace that it went down as smooth as velvet sunshine, and for a split-second he missed the battery-acid that passed for whiskey on Ganymede.

It seemed that she had become a skilled socialite overnight. Attending social functions by her side (thanks to Marjorie's extensive rollodeck of contacts), Jet couldn't help but compare her to a mob enforcer: she always knew who to hit and how hard.

"How do you do it?" he asked her later as they returned to her apartment. He threw himself on the couch she had just appropriated with a relieved grunt. He relished the new furniture smell. Perhaps he _should_ dump that yellow couch….

"Do what?" she asked, taking off her earrings absently and dropping them on the counter. Her steps were still lively even when she'd been dancing all night in those damned stilettos.

"All of it… The smiling, the laughing, the witty comments…" he admired the arc of her arm as she lazily reached behind her to pull the pins from her hair. "It's like you were born for it."

She shook the silken mass around her head with a sigh, her mouth curved like a cat's.

Not for the first time, Jet found himself studying her… admiring how she wore her perfection and poise with a carelessness and ease rivaled only by Spike.

"It's something my parents were good at." she answered then, plopping herself exhaustedly on the seat opposite. She seemed so happy. "My father was the British ambassador in Singapore. It meant he had to attend a lot of social functions, and my mother had to learn to entertain as well. It's all in here." She tapped her head and winked as she kicked her heels off.

"I bet your father was better at it than me." Jet grunted, helping himself to some whiskey. He walked over to the sliding doors and stared out at the misty night. "So… when did you get your memories back?"

She stopped in her foot-rubbing, surprised that he had asked the question… and then chagrined when she remembered that she had told only one person about it.

A dead space had formed abruptly between them, and Jet was sorry for being the unknowing cause of it.

"Je-sus…"he rumbled suddenly, his voice an explosion in the awkward silence. "Everybody wants…" he groped for one of his wise sayings to make her feel better, but he felt like he was the one who had been offended. "You want to change and be a somebody, but sometimes you remind me so much of Spike. HE seemed like an open book compared to you."

He resisted smashing the glass down on the counter and yanked his boots on before she could actually read his face. "Since you're so eager to leave the Bebop behind, I'm just going to say Goodbye now."

"JET!" She called out, his outburst breaking her from her reverie as she threw herself over the armchair to bar the door. "What are you talking about?"

How did the look of genuine surprise on her face made him feel like an ass? "Just tired." He amended quickly, pasting a fake yawn on his face.

"I forgot to tell you, that's all!" she exclaimed loudly, partly angry that he was being melodramatic and totally scared that she would never see him again. "You don't have to get your panties in a twist about it!"

"And I told you: I'm just tired!" he yelled, scrunching his eyes and attempting to push her away from the door. It had been a long time since he'd overreacted over a woman, and he was damned if he wanted to make another blunder in front of Faye.

"Stop being so stoic, JET!" she screamed again, wrestling with him over the door handle. "Tell me what the hell's wrong!"

The question kept repeating itself as she followed him out into the corridor, demanding, cajoling.. trying to get him to turn around and face her. His silence irritated her so much she fell to hitting, biting and clawing at him. Nothing was ever said between them, between any of them… Why couldn't she make him stay?

"GET OFF ME!" he roared suddenly as the sting of her bite sunk into his neck. Instinctively, his prosthetic arm came sweeping out the side, catching her in the gut and flinging her back against the fire hose case.

Till the day he died, he would always recall the grey marble floors of the Riverside Suites were a blood red.


	5. Broken Wings

DISCLAIMER: Don't own Cowboy Bebop

He vaguely remembered being anaesthetized before they rushed him off to emergency. It seemed like a million voices were babbling over his head. Something about the eye. There was something wrong with it, but he couldn't catch what it was. Meaning floated around him like fish in a tank.

Had he imagined that too?

He remembered being unable to fight for consciousness. He had slipped into blissful sleep.

So why was he staring at the surgeons? He must have been so traumatized by the accident and the blood that he wasdreaming of them. Surgeons that looked like the four fucking horsemen of the apocalypse. A sickly green light suffocated the room…or was that the sickening realization that he had accidentally woken up during his surgical procedure?

_Oi._ He called. He couldn't breathe or speak. _O-O-o-O I I …_ _How can the simple act of moving my lips to speak feel so impossible?_

The accident, a surge of pain through his right eye… Doohan's voice over the speakers… It all happened too fast…

_What are you doing?_

Dead silence. Metal objects being replaced in metallic trays. Smell of antiseptic. Organs suspended in formaldehyde jars like ducks in a butcher's window. White figures loomed over him like reflections in a pond. High-pitched blips echoed through the sanitized vault.

_What's.. Wh-a..?_ Like a fly batting futilely at the window, he just didn't get it. His left eye stared unblinking at the ceiling. What was the other one looking at?

_Am I dead_?

A voice finally broke through the painful silence. "Cut deeper. It takes a lot of force to get an eye out, and you've really got to pull. Pull harder."

'_An eye?' My eye? No, you're not.. You can't .. Please.. don't…_ _Don't don't don't don't don't…_ His voice screamed in his head like a siren. He couldn't feel anything, let alone twitch a toe, or lick his lips. He imagined turning his head to the side, but watched motionlessly as the surgeon to his left leaned forward to get a better look of the right side of his face.

The surgeon to his right was breathing hard, a sweaty, pinched nostril breathing as he fidgeted with something on the right side of his face. The others were motionless, breathless.. anxiously waiting for something to happen.

_I'm being buried alive. I am dead._

_No… No not dead.. not yet… Please…Please… Tell me I'm still alive… Anything… please…_

Suddenly he heard an excretion, a gross, inhuman suck of skinless eyeball and inner eye socket.

"There, I got it…"

And then a grunt and a curse. A wet splat on cold floor. As he heard his eye fall to the ground followed by: "CARL!" and "Ah, Shit." He cried. He cried in the vaults of his mind, soundless, noiseless, unheard.

When he woke up in his hospital bed the next day, he clutched at the blanket. Had he woken up from the nightmare? The violation felt so raw he didn't dare open his eyes.

When he finally did open them, the world had lost half its colour. What was a dormant hysteria before had escalated into a high-pitched screaming in his head.

Something beautiful had been taken away from him.


	6. Coffee And Clarity

Despite (or probably because of) the garish disguise Faye had put on; the owlish Jackie-O sunglasses and the big polka dot scarf wrapped around her head, Marjorie could recognize that disgruntled and livid pout anywhere.

"Going incognito, are we?" Marjorie giggled as she sat beside Faye in the Emergency room. "You should have told me earlier, darling, I would have brought my clown nose."

Suddenly noticing the big bandage over her nose and that her lower lip was swollen, Marjorie wished the earth would open up and swallow her whole. Or at least her vocal chords.

"I'm such an ass." was all she could say by way of an apology.

Faye sunk into her wheelchair like she wanted it to swallow her whole, and her arms were crossed as if she was ready to pull out a pair of Glocks and shoot everybody in the Emergency room to Hell.

And judging by Jet's morose expression, she would have started with him first.

Not one to gush outrageously over babies or scream like a banshee if she saw blood, Marjorie maintained a calm and joking demeanor. It was a useful technique she learnt from fighting against construction deadlines and the sometime unpredictable cockups they entailed.

She was full of questions, but she settled on the easiest one first: "Are you alright?"

Without even turning to look at her, Faye whipped her arms out and wrote dizzyingly fast on a little notepad, crisscrossing several times and then finally settling on one word: _No._

Studying the words she had crossed out, Marjorie finally gasped out, "You broke your nose and lost a tooth?"

Jet sunk into his hands a little deeper. Marjorie rubbed a tired hand down her face. "Hey, aren't you supposed to keep it for the bounties?"

He bolted like his ass was on fire. A firm believer in making men pay for everything (being twice divorced herself), she watched his exit with eerie calmness. Marjorie seated herself down in his vacated seat, studying Faye's profile. After a while she sighed. "It was such a beautiful nose too."

Faye sighed too, this time scribbling leisurely on her notepad. She ripped it off and passed it to Marjorie. _The doctor said it should be okay. Jet managed to reset my nose when we both stopped freaking out. _

"He looks like he got dragged backwards across hot asphalt." Marjorie commented about the scratches on his face. "What happened?"

Faye managed to look a bit shame-faced. _A bit of an altercation._

"An altercation? Isn't that what you do to shorten your dresses?"

Faye tsked impatiently. _It was a soap opera of a bitch-fight, okay?_

Marjorie kept quiet, studying the male nurses that flitted to and fro. Leaning forward, she asked: "So.. did you win?"

Faye couldn't help but smile, until she winced from the pain that is.

_Sure I did. Doesn't he look like he's in hell? _

"Knowing you, it's probably not all his fault, is it?"

_It was just an accident._ Faye confessed. _I've never seen him like this before._

"I'll go talk to him." Marjorie promised, settling a hand on her shoulder. Faye set her chin on it in silent thanks.

888

Jet was standing outside, in the middle of a phonecall on his cellphone. With his back towards the Emergency doors, he didn't notice that she was behind him and so she managed to catch snatches of his phone conversation. Unlike the usually tacit and adorably awkward Jet that she had come to know, he was interrogative and businesslike as he asked questions and responded in his usual grunts: the long Hmmms that told her that he was thinking.

"You're sure it's him?" he asked after a while, staring at the passing cars. His tone was urgent, his posture still and erect. All sense of clumsiness or self-consciousness she associated with Jet's demeanor had drained away and was replaced with a sense of determination and stern resolve. Slowly, Marjorie came to realize that this was Jet Black in his element.

It was electric.

Their eyes met, and he ended the phone call abruptly with "Thanks, Ed. I'll talk to you later."

"Still bounty hunting?" Marjorie asked curiously as he deliberately slipped the phone into his pocket.

"Can't teach an old dog new tricks." he shrugged casually. Unlike his comrades who could shake off impending doom or their true intents with the same carefree shrug, however, it made him more serious. There was a steely glint in his charcoal eyes, and a slight furrow in his brows that made Marjorie excited.

He was puzzling and thinking about something more important than club-openings and fashion galas.

It was something that had a significant impact. It was something real.

"Coffee?" Marjorie offered him a cup before sitting down on the curb. Blowing the steam off, she studied him from the corner of her eyelids.

Marjorie had a penchant for classic black and white movies, and it struck her that Jet was the classic 1940s hero - it didn't matter if he was dressed in silk and sequins or a well-tailored tuxedo. His character and his integrity would always stand out, and as such - he was the first man Marjorie ever had any respect for. It wasn't just his solid stoicism she admired, but the subtlety of his emotions. It clung about him like his woody lumberjack aftershave. She suspected that wholesome manliness of his was so ingrained that he woke up smelling like that all the time.

"Thanks for coming." he said suddenly, breaking the silence in his quiet and gruff voice. He sipped his coffee and looked off at the traffic, something else she liked about him: how he always looked so abashed when he said something sincere.

"It's no problem, I was awake anyway."

"I can see." he replied, observing that she was still in her evening gown.

"Don't worry, everybody at the party's too smashed to notice I'm gone." she said deliberately, knowing that he didn't care much for their social functions.

"I wasn't worried about that." he argued, slightly angry. _So sincere._ she couldn't help thinking, chuckling into her coffee cup.

He looked at her quizzically. "She's alright." Marjorie said after a while. He grunted.

"We both know how she is." she continued, stirring her coffee. "She takes everything personally... You _both_ do - Ah ah ah!" she admonished before he opened his mouth to interject. "I've never seen two people so passionate and dynamic and so _fucking_ clueless about peaceful social interaction ..." she stamped her stiletto heel into the ground, "It's the most annoying thing I've EVER come across!

"You both make me feel so _small_, you know." she confessed truthfully, tapping her finger against the rim of her cup. "It feels like there's a secret universe that you both know about, the thing that makes rich, bratty socialites like me insignificant."

"Well, we neither of us grew up with golden spoons in our mouths." was all Jet could say, thinking it was a vast understatement. "But it's not like you don't have a job."

Marjorie nodded in silent assent. "I still envy you, though."

"The grass is always greener on the other side." he mouthed formulaically, his thoughts preoccupied.

"That wasn't just _any _phone call, was it?" she asked suddenly, eyeing him with that all-knowing feminine intuition he remembered Spike to follow a lead on.

He rubbed a tired hand along his forehead and emitted a weary, ironic chuckle before he settled his charcoal black eyes on her. "A phone call on a bounty isn't just _any _phone call."

"You're evading my question." she scolded him.

"I know." he replied nonchalantly, ignoring the piercing glare she was leveling at him. "And you should know by now that living with Faye has made me immune to the female glare."

"You're taking all the fun out of it." she pouted.

"I'm also immune to pouting."

She laughed, finally settling into surveying the night sky. "It's something you don't want _her _to know about, huh?"

"You're not going to open Pandora's box tonight, Marjorie." he warned her.

"You don't want her to go with you." It wasn't a question. "You're not going off to get yourself killed, are you?"

Jet was startled out of his calm indifference enough to spill some coffee.

"Was that what you guys were arguing about tonight?"

He was getting increasingly agitated. She could tell by the deepening furrow in his brow, and the bristling in his beard. "She has a right to know, Jet."

"Look, Marjorie..." he stated in a dangerously calm voice, his eyes finally locking with hers with such righteous anger she couldn't look away. "You know nothing about us to know what she has a right to know, or not to know. I'll take care of her, if I have to lose an arm again to protect her, I will."

"Her broken nose is a weird way of showing it." she contradicted, feeling the rage well up in her until she could almost hear her heart beating.

She watched his eyes soften. He grunted and patted her apologetically on the head and let out a long sigh.

"That was something else entirely." was all he managed to say, not wanting to vindicate himself by dismissing it as an accident. He knew it was, but he still felt rotten about the emotions that led up to it.

Draining the last of his coffee, he stood up and dusted the back of his black pants down. Marjorie did the same, looping her hand impulsively in his arm as they walked back to Emergency.

Catching their reflections in the sliding doors on their way back in, he barely suppressed a completely random thought.

_I wish it were Faye._


	7. Confessions from the Devil

They were in the cathedral rectory. A fan sat in the corner, its blades spinning feebly. It barely unsettled the wafer thin pages of the open bible in the middle of a huge oak desk.

Vicious sat languorously in the seat behind it, his long legs perched on the corner crossed at the ankles.

A chorus of angelic voices filtered through the late afternoon air. The cathedral's choir-boys were practicing in the main atrium, their voices rising to the rafters as their hymn reached its peak.

Even after the choir-boys left, their carefree laughter and quickly thudding footsteps bouncing of the walls, their last heart-wrenching notes of hope, despair and resurrection resounded through the hollow cathedral like a distant bell.

If any of this affected Vicious at all, he did not show it. His dead gray eyes stared out at the setting sun, its dying orange rays shone through the window, catching in his silver hair like a blood red halo.

And Mao Yenrai's corpse perched precariously on a bench lining the wall, fixing her with its blank stare.

Cuffed to the chair opposite Vicious, Faye barely breathed. The elusive yet penetrating smell of Mao's blood was consuming and unbearable. She struggled for the words that would describe it, thinking that writers didn't know what they were talking about when they called it 'coppery'. Coppery had a warm, burnished, wholesome feeling one finds in the kitchen. _A REAL kitchen._

The blood just made her gag. She sucked her lower lip in, pinching it with her teeth to distract herself.

Suddenly she found Vicious contemplating her intently. His eyes both mysterious and penetrating.

"You seemed to recognize me when we first met." he stated in a silent question, his eyes pinning her down like a bug.

"I've heard of you." Faye swallowed. "From others."

"What doyou know of _him_?"

"Nothing." she confessed. And then, out of agitation she added: "He's just some carefree, careless bum I have to work with." She had been glancing at the clock ticking patiently on the wall, thinking how _like _that lunkhead to come late.

"Do you always go around with your eyes closed?" he asked then, his tone condescending and his eyes far away. It seemed that he had said this to somebody else a long time ago.

"I'm a thief. Of course I don't."

He was looking steadily out the window as she said this, and her words made him smile slightly. She wouldn't realize till later what Vicious had known: that for all of Spike's misgivings about thieves, he was the biggest one among them.

Apparently filling up time until Spike arrived, Vicious leaned forward, his voice seemed rusty from disuse as he began to make her understand who Spike Spiegel Lunkhead was. .

"Don't make the same mistake I did of underestimating him." he confided in a sibilant whisper. He had taken a seat next to her now, his dead eyes glancing over her breasts with nothing more than to notice that they were there. "For all intents and purposes, he was a skilled fighter, a keen diplomat: the best man you could have watching your back."

The crocodile smile dropped from his face as he remembered the past. His eyes were a dull, wistful gray as he smiled ruefully.

"He was an angel, but more importantly: a demon hungering for blood and freedom. The only thing holding him down was an angel's unswerving loyalty. You know to whom that was, don't you?"

Laughing at her silent apprehension, he clued her in by pointing exaggeratedly at Mao Yenrai's corpse. It was propped against the wall, silently sitting in on their discussion. Faye smelt the rot, heard the flies buzzing around it with rising nausea.

"What has _he _got to do with anything?" she asked feebly, disliking how close Vicious was right now. The tickle of his long silver hair along her neck, but most of all, the evil grin on his face as he continued whispering in her ear like the Serpent in Paradise.

Faye listened with increasing incredulity as he disclosed to her a whole criminal underground world that Spike and Vicious had not only inhabited, but literally dominated in _service_ of an adoptive father that sat quietly decomposing a few feet away.

It did not fit that lounge-happy idiot. She could see his lanky form now, stretched across the yellow couch like a cat in a sliver of sunshine. Blissful, ignorant and lazy.

She imagined in her head a Spike Spiegel that was somewhat dingy, alcoholic and manic all at once for what he had apparently done for the syndicate. Not that fuzzy-haired joker with whom she had made it a daily ritual to annoy and mooch off of.

"Nobody could touch Mao while Spike was there." Vicious continued inexorably. "He was Mao's fangs. But with no personal agenda, that loyalty means nothing.

"I wanted to take over the syndicate, but I couldn't afford to lose Spike's followers by killing him overtly: I had to divert his loyalty elsewhere. Give him his freedom, so to speak." He looked at her hungrily then, silently laughing at something funny.

"You don't immediately strike me as his type." he stated almost conversationally, lifting a long finger to pull back a shard of hair from her face. She was pale, shaking and looked slightly sickly. Dead bodies tended to do that to people. It made her look beautiful. He studied her like one does an enigma, neither of them moving or looking away. "But I like you. You're every bit as helpless as Julia was, but there's something wild and gamine there."

"Julia?" she echoed stupidly, grabbing onto that name like a cat treading water.

"Yes." he confirmed absently, tapping his finger thoughtfully on his katana. "She was my secret weapon. The one thing that would make Spike leave the syndicate, and ultimately Mao Yenrai."

"Who was she?" she asked, her mouth dry. The buzzing flies and the smell were all that she could sense right now. Vicious was a blurred reflection on the other side of the looking glass.

He smiled bleakly. "She was supposed to be my Delilah. The one to weaken and destroy him." and then his smile tightened, along with his fist around the hilt of his katana. "But she turned out to be Helen of Troy, the woman who weakened an empire. So like a woman to fall in love with her target."

Faye barely registered the names as she threw up all over his shoes. She felt the tension drain from her soon after, and it made her feel better to know Vicious would be facing Spike down smelling like puke.

888

"Feeling better?" he asked conversationally as she finished sipping the water and cleaning her face. To her chagrin, his shoes and pants were back to being spotless and he was back to being pristinely ominous again.

As she was cuffed again, she noticed Mao Yenrai's absence with a sigh of relief. The color had returned to her face, and she was feeling irritable. Her stomach growled.

"If you just want Spike, why do I have to be here?" she asked somewhat petulantly, dreading his continuation of a story that wasn't going to have a happy ending.

He looked at her then, a queer half-smile on his face that reminded her so much of Spike that moment.

"Yes." he stated after a long while, "I really _do_ like you."

"Enough to let me go?" she asked with a sweet smile.

"That wasn't what I meant." he replied with uncharacteristic lightheartedness.

She remained silent, mulling over the sudden change over Vicious. His sudden friendliness was unsettling, and sad.

"You remind me of Spike." he confided then, his expression grave, sad and reminiscent.

"Is that why you're dragging him back here? For a syndicate reunion?" she demanded, staring him full in the face. "He's left the syndicate, isn't that what you wanted?"

"There are binds to the life we lead." he murmured grimly, his manner suddenly businesslike and alert. "It affects Spike more than you will ever know, and no matter how hard you try - he will always be half the man he ever was. You should thank me now for putting him out of his misery."

The door opened then, and one of his underlings strode in and bowed politely. "He's arrived, sir."

"I know." Vicious replied eagerly, the mirthless smile returning to his face. "Oh, and Miss Valentine..."

She turned to him reluctantly.

"When you bend over his dying body to kiss him goodbye, remember to look into his right eye. His left eye's mechanical and doesn't register colors." He grabbed her face then and forced her to look at him. "You _do_ want him to see the face of his so-called life in its every vibrant shade and color before he dies, don't you?"

"He might not have to if you go to Hell first."

He smiled bleakly. "I'm already there."

888

Despite Vicious' painfully detailed narrative, it all seemed like a big misunderstanding. Especially when she remembered the half-affectionate warmth in his eyes when Spike had jokingly told her that he would come. She hadn't fully understood the extent of how Spike dealt with danger until that day.

Self-centred Faye was just jubilated that somebody would help her get out of this mess she stuffed herself into again. She didn't even bother to stifle the twitter in her heart when she saw Spike's cocky smirk on the screen.

That was until she finally met the syndicate Spike. Spike in a ratty grey trenchcoat with the look of stillness in his eyes. He didn't even bother negotiating or putting his gun up, or scratching that thick head of his with a sheepish grin and saying: "Well, looks like I came to the wrong party..."

He just pulled the trigger.

The case of mistaken identity theory she had conjured up crashed around her like the cathedral window.

Spike didn't come to negotiate, and Vicious sure as hell wasn't expecting him to. What followed was a frenzy of hate and bloodshed, the sound of gunfire and explosions followed her out into the cathedral parking lot as she looked for her Redtail.

It was no dream.

The words spun in her head as she feverishly undid her handcuffs and S.O.Sed Jet. They froze in her mind as she heard a crash and turned in time to watch Spike's body plummet to the ground.

Even as she bent over him to check for his vital signs, she couldn't help but close his left eye with one bloodied hand and pray to his open one to live through this.

She would never kiss him goodbye.


End file.
